15 April 2016 10:30 AM

I thought this exchange between me and Bert, our resident Mr Contrary, on the 'Kevin' thread, deserved a wider audience. As always, Bert is free to respond at length, if he wishes:

Bert: Mr Hitchens,

Thank you for the clarification that Helen is not a real person. Good to know.

***PH writes: I thank Bert for his sarcastic rejoinder. Mine, however, was the original and authentic sarcasm, and Bert deserved it. I made this point because Bert was arguing as if 'Helen' in 'The Archers' was real. Her unreality (involving something close to multiple repeated character transplants, according to some listeners I know) makes 'her' (she doesn't exist!) case useless for any serious discussion of the matter. Such character transplants are common in soap opera plots and are a direct result of their propaganda purpose. Individual characters are cyphers, without the true enduring natures of real human beings. People are made to do things which are entirely incredible, for the sake of a morally or culturally loaded storyline.

Anti-marriage campaigners, who never sleep, and who continue to believe that marriage is a seething nest of rape and patriarchal oppression (though they have learned not to say this openly nowadays), have recently begun to invent new marital offences of verbal or psychological abuse, and new defences (against murder or manslaughter charges) of long-term indirect provocation. These are of course not capable of objective proof. That's why they are so potent in the continuing campaign to eradicate marriage and replace it with temporary state-licensed civil partnerships for both sexes. Anyone charged with them is going to have a very tough time defending himself, and the presumption of innocence will not properly function. In a direct choice between two subjective accounts of events, today's right-on police, CPS and courtroom culture will tend to believe the female accuser more than it believes the male defendant.

The invented character 'Rob' commits these offences in invented scenes at which the soap's listeners are privileged ear-witnesses of a kind which seldom if ever exist in such cases. The invented character 'Helen' feebly endures them for months as if she were a trapped 1930s housewife living in an Enid Blyton or Agatha Christie village, rather than a 21st-century woman, free to manage her own affairs, who knows perfectly well that her friends, family and neighbours, plus the authorities, the police, the media and the courts would take her side against such treatment. Having decided to leave, she then delays her invented departure until her invented notoriously menacing and evil-tempered husband is back at the fictional home to get in the way. when any sane person would have been well over the horizon, with her child, long before his return. What's more, the cruel, overbearing 'husband' is bizarrely incapable of defending himself against a fictional knife attack by a fictional woman who (unless 'Helen' has been doing weight-lifting and combat training) has half his upper-body strength and two thirds of his reach. The thing is quite unbelievable, and illustrates nothing except my point about soap opera propaganda. The 'private' moments which listeners to the 'Archers' have endured have made them complicit in this propaganda fiction. They think they 'know' what the police and courts cannot know. Actually, they just know what the scriptwriters have invented.***

Bert: You say that you think you could make an argument that severe violence, or conviction for a crime resulting in a long period of imprisonment, went beyond the limits of 'for better, for worse'. I interpret this as meaning that, for you, the sort of treatment meted out by her husband to Helen would not be a good enough reason for her to leave?

***PH: Then he misinterprets it. I said nothing of the kind, only that the circumstances I described might be justly seen as grounds for separation. I don't think the fictional treatment meted out by an invented person to another invented person in a propagandist soap opera is any basis for an argument at all. Hence my dismissal of 'Helen' as fictional, a point which Bert still seems to have some trouble grasping. No such person ever existed, exists now or ever will exist, and no such circumstances, either. ***

Bert: I would disagree.

***PH: well, of course he would. That's what he does. I state an opinion. Bert disagrees with it. We are all used to this (his determined and increasingly moving last stand on the EU Landfill Directive makes George Armstrong Custer look like a poltroon and a dilettante) and, as usual, it requires no reasoning or facts to explain it. It just is so. We could invent a soap opera in which a person like him behaved like this. People would laugh.****

Bert: As for the separation/divorce distinction, doesn’t this mean that someone who had chosen to leave a marriage because of severe violence would therefore never be in a position to benefit from the financial advantages that social conservatives want to attach to the marriage institution?

***PH: I am not sure which advantages he's referring to.The last significant financial privilege of marriage is the exemption from inheritance tax on property at death, which doesn't seem to be much of an issue in such a case. Social conservatives have no legislative power, so their ideas are of little interest. The other benefits were never up to much. It was the social, moral and cultural standing of marriage which gave it its strength, not tax breaks.****

Bert: You may say that such a person should have chosen a better spouse in the first place (through the rather Austen-like greater family liaison beforehand, perhaps), but it still seems harsh to me.

***PH: Well, divorce seems harsh to me, especially for the children involved. He must choose which harshness he prefers. In this Vale of Tears, total permanent ease and happiness are not available. Sometimes we just have to decide which of two difficult roads is the right one***.

29 June 2014 12:14 AM

Do you remember when the Blair creature was still worshipped and glorified? When he smiled his way through elections we all now know he should have lost?

I do. It was very lonely. Now that he has become a swearword, and everyone despises him, I am often tempted to remind these people how they used to fawn on him.

But why waste time on him? His life is now one of deepening sadness as he sits among his huge and useless riches and yet is despised by those whose approval he yearns for.

The important thing is to realise we are making a very similar mistake now. The same sort of people who managed the Blair fraud long ago gave up on him, and started work on the Cameron fraud instead.

These people are like advertising men stuck with a product that is no good, a car that breaks down, a soap that crumbles into powdery grease when it touches water, a foodstuff that tastes disgusting and cleaves to the tongue. Yet they have signed a contract to promote it.

At all costs they must keep the consumer from seeing the truth until after he has bought the merchandise. One way of doing this is to spread negative stories about rival products.

The shameful and childish personal abuse directed against Ed Miliband has now reached a point where honourable Conservatives must be tempted to vote Labour in protest against it.

The reason for this Stalinist destruction of personal credit is simple. There is no political difference of any significance between the two men. So instead we are supposed to make up our minds on the basis of the size of Mr Miliband’s teeth. Heaven itself cannot help a nation which settles its future on this basis.

The utter falsity of Mr Cameron’s recent play-acting about the EU is astounding. He is now reduced to issuing bombastic threats of future displeasure over a needless defeat which he himself sought, to try to fool his stupider voters into thinking he is something he is not. It is we who will ‘live to regret’ taking this man seriously.

It is simply not true, as almost every media outlet obediently parroted yesterday, that Britain is now one step closer to leaving the EU. We are as trapped in it as ever. Not one molecule of David Cameron is hostile to British membership of the EU. His godfather and first political mentor was Tim Rathbone, a sopping wet Tory MP eventually expelled from the party for supporting a pro-European breakaway.

Mr Cameron’s fellow Bullingdon Club hearty, Radek Sikorski, now foreign minister of Poland, and keen on all things EU, thinks of his old friend as an enthusiast for Brussels. Tapes of Mr Sikorski’s Warsaw table talk emerged last week.

Every word of it assumes Mr Cameron is really on the side of the EU: ‘He stupidly tries to play the system… his whole strategy of feeding them scraps in order to satisfy them is just as I predicted, turning against him; he should have said, “Bleep off!” tried to convince people and isolate [the sceptics]. But he ceded the field to those that are now embarrassing him.’

He is only wrong in one thing. Mr Cameron’s critics are not turning against him. One supposedly ‘Eurosceptic’ Tory MP publicly licked the Prime Minister’s polished toecaps in the Commons only the other day.

How sad it is that, given the self-censorship of the entire London political media, we need to turn to bootleg tapes of a Polish politician to read an honest account of Mr Cameron’s tactic – stupid propaganda, feeding his critics scraps.

Mr Cameron’s famous referendum has been set for 2017 because the premier knows he will be out of office by then. It is a post-dated cheque.

His futile battle against Jean-Claude Juncker is accompanied, again, by low personal smears – a former member of the Bullingdon isn’t well-placed to sneer at someone else’s drinking habits. And it is what is called ‘triangulation’. By appearing to fight against something the public dislike, you pretend that you share the public’s views.

David Blunkett, when Education Secretary and making schools even worse, used to do the same by getting barracked at Teachers’ Union conferences. Home Secretary Theresa May does it by rubbing the Police Federation up the wrong way.

Don’t you see the crude tricks they are playing on you? Don’t you see why they need to hire people such as Andy Coulson? Do you, as you did with Blair, have to wait once again until it is far too late, to recognise this swindle for what it is?

'Mighty' America humiliated again

The collapse of American power in the Middle East is astonishing, especially given that they fought so hard to replace us there.

The indefensible jailing, on evidence-free charges, of three journalists in Egypt came a few hours after Washington’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, had handed the Cairo junta a huge slice of American taxpayers’ money.

This payment can only be made legal in the US by pretending that the Egyptian military putsch was not a putsch. The dictatorship’s response went beyond scorn. They took the money and jailed the journalists anyway, in spite of Mr Kerry’s personal plea to spare them.

No doubt Mr Kerry was scared that, if he refused the cash, Saudi Arabia would have stepped in with its own large chequebook.

But such weakness, and willingness to be humiliated by this appalling despotism, look especially foolish from a government, which repeatedly bombs other countries for not being democratic.

Diversity in what, exactly?

How does the BBC get away with its blatantly racialist plan to ensure that one in every seven actors or presenters is black, Asian or from an ethnic minority within three years?

When are we going to judge people not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character, as Martin Luther King said we should? Anyway, if it’s diversity the BBC wants, it could start by employing any journalists at all who aren’t fanatically Green or Left-wing.Shock news! Divorce and drugs are badWhen the Pope speaks out for Christianity, it’s to be expected, and in the way of business. The statements you want to watch out for are the ones which come from people who criticise their own side.

There have been two this week – Penelope Leach, the liberals’ favourite child-care expert, says there’s no doubt that divorce damages children. And Professor Sir Simon Wessely, the new head of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, warns against the medicalisation (and drugging) of normal children. If they say so, it must be bad.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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04 May 2014 12:01 AM

Marriage died last week after a long illness. There will still be weddings, of course. But they won’t mean anything any more. They’ll be like those certificates saying you are ‘Lord of the Manor’ which gullible Americans buy.

The whole point of marriage was that it was binding for life – ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us do part’.

That is what made it such a fortress against other influences. The State couldn’t break into it. It was a small, private place where we were sovereign over our own lives.

Either you like this or you don’t. I believe that raising children as well as we can is the central purpose of our lives. I also think that lifelong marriage is the best way of doing it, and of ensuring that we do not run away from it, as many of us are inclined to do.

I also think the greatest test of character most of us will face will come when a husband or wife falls ill and becomes dependent on us. Marriage, by leaving us no choice in this, actually makes it easier.

But in the late 1960s, Britain and most other Western countries introduced divorce laws that hollowed out the marriage oath.

Since then, if either spouse wishes to break the solemn marriage promise, the State and the law actively take that spouse’s side.

If the other half of the marriage wishes to stay married, he or she can in the end be removed from the home by force, with the threat of prison.

I am still amazed that this totalitarian change came about with so little protest.

Now the very sharp and influential Sir James Munby, senior judge in the English family courts, has said that couples should be able to end a marriage simply by signing a form at a register office, with no need for lawyers or judges.

And, being smart, he has also urged the next obvious step – that cohabiting couples should be treated as if they are officially married once they have stayed together for a couple of years.

After all, why not? There’s no important difference any more. Official forms long ago stopped referring to ‘husband’ or ‘wife’, and those who cling to these archaic terms are frequently told by bureaucrats that they are now in fact ‘partners’.

I think Sir James will get his wish. And everyone will be happy, happy, happy – except the growing multitude of children who have never known domestic security and now never will, and the lonely, confused old men and women with nowhere to turn but the doubtful comforts of the care home, where their lives can dribble away in a medicated haze, perhaps punctuated by slaps and insults.

Another BBC series that needs subtitles (but this time they have a good excuse)

Since even home-made BBC productions need subtitles these days, I am surprised the Corporation hasn’t been making more of its powerful new German-made mini-series on the Second World War as experienced by ‘normal’ Germans.

By the time you read this, you’ll probably have already missed two episodes of Generation War but it’s well worth catching up on iPlayer, or perhaps they could repeat it soon. It convulsed Germany when it was shown there last year.

It also infuriated Poles, who reasonably thought that it wasn’t for the Germans, of all people, to remind them that quite a lot of Poles had been anti-Semites.

But it’s worth seeing for lots of reasons. First, it is simply good TV, never boring, full of incident, some of it horrible, some of it deeply unlikely, but all of it interesting.

If you think modern Germans have fully confronted the horrors of the Hitler era, this drama will show you how very wrong you are. They’ve barely begun.

This helps to explain Berlin’s continuing desire to advance coyly behind the smokescreen of the European Union rather than under its own flag. You might also notice that the film completely ignores the first two years of the war, and only begins with the invasion of, er, Ukraine.

One simple question will tell us all we need to know about drugs

I see that even the slow learners in the media are at last picking up on the mountains of reputable research which show that ‘antidepressants’ are vastly over-prescribed even on their own terms, often have unpleasant side effects, and may not actually be any more effective against ‘depression’ than sugar pills.

Others all eventually follow where this column has led for years, though, of course, they never admit it.

So here’s a new challenge for the slow learners. I cannot see how anyone can oppose it. Can we please now have a simple rule for all coroners, magistrates and judges?

Wherever someone has taken his own life, or wherever someone is accused of taking someone else’s life, or of an act of dangerous violence, the police, doctors and pathologists involved should be required to discover whether that person has ever been a user of mind-altering drugs, whether legally prescribed, or illegal.

I believe that if this question is asked, it will become plain that there is a frightening correlation between such drugs and such acts. Then, at last, we can do something.

Have you noticed how the BBC discusses UKIP as if it is a problem rather than a legitimate party? Have you observed the pathetic attempts of Tory spin-doctors (who can think of nothing to say in favour of their own organisation) to smear UKIP from morn till night?

Have you also noticed the slavish obedience of political journalists, who have spent the past ten years ignoring the biggest issues in British politics – the EU and immigration – but now recycle these trivial slanders in the hope that they can save the old, dying parties which have spoon-fed them all their stories?

This sort of ganging up has not worked on the Scots, who understandably grow fonder of independence with every stupid threat and falsehood. I have a feeling it’s not going to work on the English either – and in case you hadn’t noticed by now, Nigel Farage is in fact England’s answer to Alex Salmond.

If anyone is charged, tried and convicted for the murder of Jean McConville during the Irish Troubles, what will happen to that person? If I have correctly understood the 1998 Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act, my belief is that he or she would serve a maximum prison sentence of two years. When I asked the Northern Ireland Office if I was right, they issued a panicky refusal to comment.

27 April 2014 12:01 AM

It hurts me to say it, but the grisly gang of anti-God professors and authors are right, and David Cameron is wrong. This is not a Christian country any more. Actually, I suspect the Prime Minister knows this quite well, as he and his Nasty Party have never done anything to defend the national religion from its attackers.

It is of course possible that Mr Cameron is genuinely pulsing with the power of the Holy Ghost. But it is hard to forget that he is also trying to defend his flanks against UKIP, and to win back some of the ex-Tories who defected over same-sex marriage.

Then there’s the problem of his children’s education. His well-publicised attendance at a London church miles from his home has helped him and one of his senior colleagues to insert their young into one of the best primary schools in England.

Too bad for any children of poor Christian parents who couldn’t get in because the school is crammed with Tory infants.

Of course Mr Cameron could afford a private school, but since the Tory Party was taken over by left-wingers, its leaders, like Labour’s, have to pretend to love the state system

Now, I know nothing of the inner mind of our nation’s Premier, but I can think of few things less Christian than to use outward displays of faith to gain material or political advantages for yourself, especially if you do so at the expense of the poor.

Before he began doing God, Mr Cameron declined to criticise ‘middle-class parents with sharp elbows’, praising them as ‘active citizens’. This was presumably at one of those moments when his religion was fading out, ‘like Magic FM in the Chilterns’, rather than fading in.

Now, neither Mr Cameron nor Mr Blair, nor even Harold Wilson (who launched the Cultural Revolution) or Margaret Thatcher (who fought so hard to abolish the Christian Sabbath), can be blamed for destroying the Christian church in this country.

It bayoneted itself in the heart by supporting the First World War when it should have used every sinew to stop it. The Church in this country and all of Europe has never recovered.

But both parties have kicked Christianity when it was down. Their joint support for easy divorce effectively cancelled the Church of England’s marriage oath, in which husband and wife swore to remain together for life.

Their joint backing for abortion on demand undid one of the greatest advances made by Christian civilisation, which ended the pagan practice of murdering unwanted children.

They quietly allowed the teaching of Christianity as the national religion to disappear (illegally) from hundreds of state schools. Religion is now taught instead as a sort of oddity which other people do, and which you can laugh at provided they are not Muslims, who must be treated with respect in case they get angry. Pupils are now ignorant of the faith that formed their nation, but are force-fed green propaganda, and dangerously bad advice about sex and drugs.

But above all, there was Harriet Harman’s 2010 Equality Act, which was actually an EU Directive. If the Tories had been in office at the time, they would have passed it themselves. This turned the pursuit of ‘equality’ into our new national belief system, alongside the closely related commitment to ‘human rights’.

It is not just that these ideas are quite different from the Christian beliefs in authority, duty, self-restraint and conscience that used to govern our law and life.

They are actively hostile to an established Church. For they ban any ‘discrimination’ on the grounds of religion. And that means that the law cannot discriminate in favour of the Christian faith – a change many radical judges welcome.

In practice, of course, it also means that Islam, which brooks no mockery or disrespect, grows strong while the gentler voice of Anglicanism grows fainter and fainter until it is blown away on the breeze. You wait and see.

But for now, until the church is turned into a mosque or a bar, the faith schools are still jolly good, if you can wangle your sons and daughters into them.

He is a bit silly sometimes, but Charles is our best hope

I can remember when there was no political advertising on public transport at all. Now a great deal of such advertising has a political message of one sort or another, so why the censorship, on the London Underground, of the Almeida Theatre’s striking poster for its play about what will happen when Prince Charles becomes King?

I think it’s genuine fear of an unavoidable national crisis, myself. I have long predicted (and in a way hoped for) a clash between Charles and the Government when he eventually comes to the throne. When it arrives, many who now fashionably despise the Monarchy will find themselves unexpectedly siding with him.

The Prince is silly on some things (warmism especially) but in most matters he is far closer to the nation’s heart and soul than the political class. And he has just as much of a moral claim to speak for us.

Think about it. It’s the party machines, not us, who actually choose MPs in safe seats, and then boss them around. And it’s money from rather fishy billionaires that pays for their campaigns, and they expect their reward. Whereas the heir to throne is nobody’s creature, and hasn’t sold himself to the highest bidder.

It is amazing that the Blair Creature does not grasp how much he is despised, especially by those who once admired him. He has taken to making speeches about doing good in the Middle East, where his Iraq policy helped to ruin the lives of millions for decades to come.

It also cost this country billions we could not afford, not to mention 179 British lives.

I still think the only way for him to regain our respect would be to take a vow of lifelong silence in a very austere monastery, where he could perhaps clean the lavatories. But he still thinks he was right, and many of his accomplices also still walk around as if they had done nothing wrong.

It is a gigantic scandal that Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the Iraq War, which ceased taking evidence three years ago, has yet to be published. Who is holding it up and why? Is it frontbench collusion between the parties? If Parliament is any use at all, it will force publication this year.

There is nothing at all ‘racist’ in UKIP’s election posters. Those who use the word simply prove that the expression has become nothing more than an empty smear. What’s wrong with the placards is that they just aren’t very good.

In the crowded pedestrian zone of a prosperous Home Counties town, I politely asked a heedless cyclist to dismount. He ploughed on. I grew slightly less polite, and – to my joy – won the support of two other citizens, who eventually forced the lawbreaker to stop. There were, of course, no police officers to be seen. At this point a group of tattooed, pierced young men joined in, on the side of the cyclist. We had infringed his human rights, or something.

It could have turned nasty, and nearly did. But what struck me is that there is now no guaranteed majority on the side of goodness in public places. And there might soon be a majority for wickedness.

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04 July 2013 3:37 PM

However many times I rebut the charge of nostalgia, people repeat it, when they cannot be bothered to argue with me properly. The latest such accusation comes from Mr Christopher Charles, who wrote as follows in response to my article on ‘The Lost Past of the Church of England’:

‘Underpinning so many of PH's posts lies the wish that at some point in the past - a forever shifting point - the world had stood still. That people had stopped thinking, stopped enquiring had stifled the human instinct to explore and instead become resigned to the way things are.

He has little time for human progress. Sadly for him progress isn’t that bothered.

He [or one of his myrmidons] will respond that it's been anything BUT progress. But every change brings both good and bad. It's in the nature of the human condition. The idea that the C of E could at some stage have stopped and said, 'I think this is as good as it's ever going to get, let's stop here and keep everything as it is' verges on the preposterous.

I share a lot of PH's sadness at what has been lost. I don't share his perpetual need to bang on about it. Life is only happening now. Engage with it, argue with it by all means. But fighting yesterday's battles is what elderly generals do over glasses of port. Better to engage with now.’

Let us take this lazy and rather ill-mannered intervention piece by piece. I cannot tell what my ‘myrmidons’ will do, and didn’t know I had any. ( I understand that they were a warlike people inhabiting ancient Thessaly when first mentioned in Homer, and no doubt I would rather have them on my side than against me).

1. Mr Charles asserts : ‘Underpinning so many of PH's posts lies the wish that at some point in the past - a forever shifting point - the world had stood still. That people had stopped thinking, stopped enquiring had stifled the human instinct to explore and instead become resigned to the way things are.’

I reply: **On what written or spoken words of mine does he base this mighty assertion? Could it perhaps be based on my repeated statements, here repeated yet again, that I do not believe there was ever a golden age; that the past is dead and that we cannot return to it even if we wish; that my main concern is about the future, and about the fact that we are currently choosing the wrong future?

As for fixed points, I know only too well that virtue, unless constantly nurtured and encouraged, decays. In this world one has to run as fast as one can just to stay in the same place. Those beautiful cathedrals (to employ a metaphor) have remained beautiful not through neglect or complacency but through constant loving and respectful renewal, based upon an understanding of, and a love for their original design and intent. Not a decade passes when they are not clothed in scaffolding. Yet the virtues they proclaim have remained the same.

What is actually contained in this baseless assertion is Mr Charles’ s own implied belief that his opinions are the epitome of goodness and correctness, and that all developments tending towards them are axiomatically good. This is implied so heavily in Mr Charles’s language that it is almost explicit. His view is that , for this country to have retained and renewed the Christian morals of circa 1955, people would have had to have ‘stopped thinking’ , ‘stopped enquiring’ , ‘stifled the human instinct to explore’ and ‘become resigned to the way things are’.

Does he really think that the proponents of lifelong monogamous marriage are unaware of the alternatives? Or that there is anything new about sexual licence? The whole of the 1549 marriage service, more or less identical to the 1662 service which is still valid in law, though largely despised and avoided by modern Anglican bishops and ministers is in essence an argument against the worldly view on the matter. Any social historian, especially a liberal one, will go on at length about how the unmarried state was extremely common in pre-Edwardian England – and correctly so. The triumph of monogamy and virtue came only after the great evangelising campaigns of Wesley and others, which formed the world we live in and are now losing, or - in my view - actively throwing away.

Mr Charles, in another breathtaking assumption that his view is somehow the only virtuous one, denigrates the opinion that lifelong faithful marriage should be sustained against pressure for easy divorce. That pressure, as he would know if he read my book as cited in the original article, was great and is now greater. He states that to hold my opinion (in favour of lifelong monogamy) involves ceasing to think, and becoming ‘resigned’ to the way things are. Well, this just prejudges the issue. To be ‘resigned’ is to accept reluctantly and unwillingly. I can see why people might initially be reluctant to accept lifelong monogamy, which places heavy loads on patience, self-control, cheerfulness in adversity, generosity and other human virtues which are all undoubtedly hard to maintain. But I can also see why, even so, it would be worth their while to do so. And I can, further, see why a rational morally-educated person might regard such virtue as one of the glories of human existence.

**I have never understood how an otherwise intelligent person could deploy this non-argument without embarrassment. What is this ‘progress’ of which he speaks? What measuring device does he possess which can show objectively that the movement he observes is forwards or backwards? Generally there will be a price paid for any ‘improvement’. Is it worth it? Are we even fully aware of the price we will pay at the time we accept the change? How – and when - do we judge? Was the 20th century, for instance, an era of shining improvement or one of the darkest nights of human depravity? Both could be argued. When and how will we be able to be sure which it was? It is clear, as soon as we consider this, that a different set of tools is necessary, one which divides good from bad and right from wrong.

And what we then find is that we are back at the old religious quarrel, which is itself an argument about whether man is basically good or basically sinful; and also about man’s sovereignty over himself, and whether (if it exists at all) it owes any duties to any higher law. This measure will tell you whether mass legal abortion, for instance, is good or bad. It will tell you whether lifelong faithful marriage is a fortress of virtue or a repressive prison. These are not new things. Over the recorded centuries, men have taken different views of them. The passage of time has not decided which is right and which is wrong, nor can it. That discovery will always lie elsewhere. For me, it is to be found in eternity. For my opponents it is to be found in immediate practicality.

3. Then Mr Charles attempts to be witty, giggling ‘ Sadly for him (me) progress isn’t that bothered.’

**Not funny. But even so, it is an interesting giveaway that Mr Charles gives ‘progress’ a personality. To many who hold his beliefs ‘Progress’ is a sort of deity, and I’m sure I’ve seen 19th-century sculptures trying to represent it, the usual clear-eyed, stern young woman on her plinth, eyes fixed on the golden future, torch in her upraised hand. Funny how those who seem actually to believe in such a golden future, and to justify their actions by asserting that they are done in the cause of ‘progress’ are always falsely accusing me of believing in a golden past.

To which I might reply ‘How can you think that? It’s 2013 ,for goodness’ sake!’ .

Except that this statement, stripped of the tones of contempt in which it usually uttered, is completely meaningless. I could say it as scornfully as Mr Charles could. But it still wouldn’t alter the fact that I had not actually made any rational point at all. The date has no bearing on whether an action is just or unjust. Its nature will persist throughout all time.

It is not ‘progress’ that dismisses my arguments with a sneer, but the moral, political and social left, which prefers to write off its opponents as babbling nostalgists, fossils and bigots than to argue with them. This is why leftist utopians, either socialist or racialist ones, so often end up killing those who oppose them. By opposing the ‘progressive’ (ie axiomatically good and correct) Left, we conservatives become axiomatically bad and incorrect people, not fully human. The modern use of the word ‘bigot’ (to mean ‘person who does not agree with the leftist agenda’) seems to me to have this demoting dehumanising character. I fear it, and suspect it will one day put me in prison or even kill me, if I live long enough.

This view is often first expressed by the claim to be on the side of ‘progress’, which is, I say it again, an arrogation of rightness. These people would be justifiably too embarrassed to say ‘I am right because I say I am right’. But they are not embarrassed to say the same thing, in the formula : ‘I am on the side of progress’ or even ‘I am on the side of history’ . They can get away with this partly because very few in the audience will realise what this statement really means, and how repellent, totalitarian and intolerant it is. We have discussed elsewhere the New Atheism and its growing tendency to characterise religious believers as ‘child abusers’ who do not deserve to be considered as fully human and so can safely be silenced and censored. It is the same thing.

Mr Charles continues : ‘He (me) [or one of his myrmidons] will respond that it's been anything BUT progress. But every change brings both good and bad. It's in the nature of the human condition. The idea that the C of E could at some stage have stopped and said, 'I think this is as good as it's ever going to get, let's stop here and keep everything as it is' verges on the preposterous.’

**No, I’m happy to cede the claims of progress to Mr Charles (who has blundered into an inconsistency here by conceding that change brings both good and bad, which if true rather explodes the concept of ‘progress). I don’t make any claims to be progressive. I seek to discover the Good, and to pursue it in my own life. Where I engage in political activity, I seek mainly to deter the state from actively discouraging the Good, as it so often does, and actively encouraging the Bad, as it so often does. But I recognise as I do this that the former Christian consensus about what is Good and Bad has been destroyed. This is why this weblog is repeatedly thrown back into discussions of virtue, its nature and origins.

It’s also why I spend so much effort discussing the past - where it is easier to make out what actually happened than it is when discussing the present. Likewise it is why I devote so much space to literature, which has a huge moral effect on the reader and is often the scripture of our time.

One contributor recently complained that there was too much history and too much religion here and too little discussion of current affairs. But actually I find I have less and less to say about current affairs, because the debates on politics are conducted at such an ignorant, unhistorical, ill-read level that one just turns away in despair. How can anyone take seriously the fake outrage of the Left against non-existent ‘cuts’ , and its claims of abject poverty in a country so rich? How can one be bothered even to mention the latest stunts and gimmicks in the world of state education, where the great issue of selection cannot even be discussed? How can one even listen to the lies of the major parties about the European Union, immigration and crime? How can one stomach David Cameron’s attacks on Labour’s indebtedness to the unions, when his own party is wholly-owned by millionaire contributors, and its candidate selection is under the thumb of an unaccountable clique as bad as anything the unions can come up with ? And so on.

And then look at Egypt . What is missing from that country (and from most countries all over the world, with a very small number of exceptions) is the level of private virtue and personal restraint and responsibility needed to sustain a free, law-governed society. So when liberty is granted it is swiftly squandered, and the country (apparently willingly) places itself once again under the rule of generals. And they hold a firework display to celebrate this happy submission to the familiar yoke.

There is a lesson in this for us, but we are too busy enjoying ourselves to learn it , so that when we too, find we have sunk willingly under the rule of strong men, we will be too indebted, sated, drunk or drugged to care.

There are different opinions on virtue and restraint. I am willing to accept (as was Whittaker Chambers long ago) that I am on the losing side in this era of human history. In that, though not ‘resigned’, I am certainly pessimistic. It saddens me to say so. But that does not make me wrong, and it doesn’t mean that the ideas of my opponents are correct, or that thought, enquiry and exploration lead inevitably and invariably to whatever Mr Charles happens to think this morning.

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16 June 2013 3:39 PM

By the end of his or her childhood, a British boy or girl is much more likely to have a TV set in the bedroom than a father at home.

Our 45-year national war against traditional family life has been so successful that almost 50% of 15-year-olds no longer live with both their parents. At the same time we have indulged our neglected and abandoned young with electronics, so that 79% of children aged between 5 and 16 have bedroom TVs.

And as we soppily mark ‘Father’s Day’ with cards, socks, sentimentality and meals out, we should remember that in almost all cases the absent parent is the father.

There is no doubt about the facts here. Let me list some of them. The cost of our wild, unprecedented national experiment in fatherlessness is now £49 billion each year, more than the defence budget. This figure, currently costing each taxpayer £1,541 per year, is rising all the time, and has gone up by almost a quarter since 2009.

The money partly goes on handouts and housing which an old-fashioned family with a working father would not have needed. Partly it goes on trying to cope with the crime, disorder, truancy, educational failure, physical and mental illness and general misery which are so much more common among the fatherless than in those from stable homes.

And there is more to come. One in three marriages ends in divorce, while many who would once have married never even bother. Roughly 300,000 families of all kinds separate every year. There are now three million children growing up in fatherless homes. Another 58 fatherless families are launched every day. And be in no doubt that it is the fathers who are, overwhelmingly, absent in these new-style modern households. Only 8% of single-parent homes are headed by a lone father.

Four in ten children being brought up by their mothers – nearly 1.2 million - have no contact with their fathers at all.

Another 67,000 (In England alone) dwell in the organised despair and neglect which are cruelly misnamed ‘care’.

In the last 40 years the proportion of adults who are married has sunk from 70% to fewer than half. The number of single adults has hugely increased (up 50%). A quarter of a million people each year spend Christmas alone. One in six adults now cohabits, compared to one in 50 in the 1960s. Cohabiting households, which have doubled in number since 1996, are the fastest-growing type of family arrangement in the United Kingdom.

By 2015, there will be two million lone parents (up 120,000 since 2010); more than 24% of children will be in lone-parent households.

It matters. Young people from fractured homes are statistically twice as likely to have behaviour problems as those from stable households. They are more likely to be depressed, to abuse drugs or alcohol, to do badly at school, and end up living in relative poverty.

Girls with absent fathers (according to studies in the USA and New Zealand) have teenage pregnancy rates seven or eight times as high as those whose fathers have stayed in meaningful touch with them.

By contrast, the link between marriage and good health is so strong that one study showed the health gain achieved by marrying was as great as that received from giving up smoking.

In all these dismal statistics of marriage decline and failure, the United Kingdom is one of the worst afflicted among advanced nations. And in many of the poorest and most desolate parts of the country, the problem is concentrated into certain areas where fathers in the home are an endangered species.

From Gosport in Hampshire, to Cardiff, Liverpool, Easington in County Durham, Inner London, Bristol, Birmingham and Sheffield, there are whole city wards where at least 60% of the households are headed by a lone parent.

And it is in such circumstances that a procession of serial boyfriends, a type of domestic arrangement closely associated with physical and sexual abuse of children, is most likely to exist.

This great fleet of hard truths is known in general to those who govern the country, and in hard detail to millions who suffer from their consequences.

How, as a country and a people can we manage to be so indifferent to them, when we claim to set fatherhood and fathers at the centre of our culture? The fundamental prayer of the Christian church begins with the words ‘Our Father’. Americans speak of their ‘founding fathers’. The father has since human society began been protector, provider, source of authority, bound by honour and fidelity to defend his hearth.

If he is gone, who takes his place ? Of all people, D.H. Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, wrote of a man and his wife as ‘a king and queen with one or two subjects and a few square yards of territory of their own…true freedom because it is a true fulfilment for man, woman and children.’

But he warned of a great danger if marriage, which makes fatherhood what it is, fell. ‘Break it, and you will have to go back to the overwhelming dominance of the State, which existed before the Christian era’.

And now we see his prophecy fulfilled. The state spends billions, and intervenes incessantly, to try to replace the lost force of fatherhood, and it fails.

I owe most of the facts above to the Centre for Social Justice, which on Friday published its full report into what it calls ‘Fractured Families’.

The CSJ is very close to the Tory party, to the government and to Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary. So it is startling to find that the report is coldly savage in its dismissal of the Cameron government’s efforts to fix this problem.

‘Conservatives say they would have been more radical on family policy had it not been for their Liberal Democrat colleagues, but even those commitments made in the Programme for Government have been ignored so far.

‘So for all of the promises the Conservatives made in Opposition, for all of the gimmick giveaways politicians have unveiled for middle-class families, and for all of the safe ‘families come in all shapes and sizes’ rhetoric ministers have used for decades, hardly anything has been done to resist the tsunami of family breakdown battering the United Kingdom’.

The authors continue: ‘Saying that family form is irrelevant is inaccurate and ultimately counter-productive…’ This is true. Someone ought to speak up for marriage. But is it entirely true to say that ‘Backing commitment and setting a goal of reducing instability does not equate to criticising or stigmatising lone parents.’? Doesn’t approval of the one inevitably stigmatise the other? And if you aren’t prepared to do that, will you get anywhere?

They also assert that ‘marriage is not a right-wing obsession’, though, speaking as a right-winger I rather think it is. It certainly isn’t a left-wing priority. They argue : ‘People throughout society want to marry, but the cultural and financial barriers faced by those in the poorest communities thwart their aspirations’.

It is certainly true that some benefits actively discourage couples from being or staying married.

But it is the ‘cultural’ barriers I want to talk about here. Anyone who dares to discuss this subject is quickly accused of ‘hating’ or wishing to persecute ‘single mothers’. Any article on the subject is supposed (maybe it is an EU regulation?) to contain a disclaimer saying that many single mothers do a great job.

Well, I neither hate single mothers nor wish to persecute them, and I am perfectly prepared to believe that many of them do a great job. But it isn’t the point. The main problem with single mothers is that they are acting rationally, in a society which actively encourages them with money and approval. Who can blame them?

There is a lot of piety about this. Suggest that anyone deliberately gets pregnant (or rather, in this age of morning-after pills and abortion on demand, deliberately stays pregnant) to get a house and a handout, and you are angrily dismissed as some kind of snobbish hate-figure.

Well, mightn’t it be true? As far as I know, nobody has ever researched the motives of the young women who accept this sparse arrangement. I wish they would. But is it unreasonable to suggest that if you reward certain types of behaviour with money and housing, and with social approval, then that behaviour will increase?

It’s not just me. Adele Adkins once recalled ‘The ambition at my state school was to get pregnant and sponge off the Government’, adding: ‘That ain’t cool.’ Perhaps successful singing stars can get away with saying what others only think.

I don’t myself see that it is a particularly harsh view to hold. A baby is a wonderful thing, and many young women long to be mothers, and good luck to them. Many modern males are a pretty unattractive proposition, so why marry one, if the state will give you a home and an income on your own?

Meanwhile men have learned enough about the divorce courts to know that marriage is a big risk. If it goes wrong, they are the ones who have to move out, and yet they will still have to pay.

Why not take advantage of the fact that the state - which once demanded the father’s name when any baby was registered, so he could be made to pay for his child - now happily allows us to leave this space blank?

My guess is that doing anything really radical about this scares all politicians too much. For the War on Fatherhood is protected by a great taboo.

In every family, every workplace, every school, every pub, every weekend football or cricket team, every political party, every church congregation, there are now large numbers of people who signed up for the Great Cultural and Moral Revolution which was launched in the 1960s and swept through the land like a mighty rushing wind in the 1970s.

The fiery heart of this was the Divorce Law Reform Act of 1969. This change was very popular. It is interesting to note that, just before it began its way through Parliament, Engelbert Humperdinck’s hymn for would-be divorcees, ‘Release Me’, pushed the Beatles off the top of the music charts for weeks on end.

The new law pretty much embodied the song’s plea ‘Please release me, let me go/For I don't love you any more/To waste our lives would be a sin/Release me and let me love again.’

Portrayed at the time as a kindness to those trapped in loveless marriages, the new law made it much easier to end a troubled union than to fight to save it.

And once this had become general, marriage changed with amazing speed from a lifelong commitment into a lifestyle choice. And from a lifestyle choice it changed into a risky and often inconvenient contract. Divorce wasn’t shameful or embarrassing any more. The country was littered with male divorcees complaining about the division of the property and the child support payments.

Men began to calculate that marriage wasn’t worth it. And the Pill and easy abortion (other parts of the 1960s revolution) put an end to shotgun weddings.

Who, in such a society, could condemn the pregnant teenager without hypocrisy? Hardly anyone, especially rackety politicians and flexible churchmen. The middle classes had abandoned lifelong marriage with a sigh of relief. The aristocracy had never cared for it much. Even the Royal Family was riddled with divorce.

The housing-estate poor were simply following the same moral code as those who posed as their betters, and weren’t actually better at all. And the adults of the era have all had a lot of fun as a result. But everyone, throughout this great period of release and revolt, forgot one small thing. What was to become of the children?

Now we are finding out. And a generation which has never known fathers, or family life, or fidelity or constancy, is now busy begetting children of its own. What will become of them? How will boys who have never seen a father learn to be fathers?

I’d have a moral panic at this stage, if I thought it would do any good. But perhaps it will be the victims of this selfish generation, our children and grandchildren, who – having suffered its effects - will re-establish stable family life in our country.

**A Hostile contributor complains about 'a distinct lack of citations' in thjis article. Apart from the fact that newspaper articles are not normally footnoted, the piece clearly states:

"I owe most of the facts above to the Centre for Social Justice, which on Friday published its full report into what it calls ‘Fractured Families’."

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05 June 2013 9:43 AM

Some of you have asked if there is a recording of my discussion of the Sexual Revolution with Linda Grant , which took place on Sunday 19th May at the Bristol Festival of Ideas. Here it is.My thanks to Luke Major, who sent me this link:

14 April 2013 2:09 AM

I suspect that Margaret Thatcher would not have much minded the wave of spiteful, immature loathing unleashed among foolish, ill-mannered people by her death.

She knew perfectly well that nothing can be achieved in politics without making enemies, though it is important to make the right ones.

I am not myself a worshipper at the Thatcher Shrine, but anyone who can make foes of Michael Heseltine, the Soviet Communist Party, Arthur Scargill, Left-wing teachers by the thousand, The Guardian newspaper, the Church of England, Jacques Delors, the BBC, Salman Rushdie and Glenda Jackson simply cannot be all bad.

The only thing that would have annoyed her would have been the lazy ignorance of most of her critics (and quite a few of her admirers too). They have not done their homework, as she always did.

They loathe her because of her voice, her old-fashioned manners and style of dress, her hair. They loathe her because she looked as if she lived in a neat, well-tended suburb. They feared her as bad, idle schoolchildren fear a strict teacher.

Many of them, half-educated Marxoid doctrinaires, scorn her out of a pseudo-intellectual snobbery that is the curse of our school system. They think they are cleverer than they are. Few of them know anything about her or her government.

Alas, if they did, the spittle-flecked Left would probably dislike her a good deal less than they do. For her 11 years in office were a tragic failure, if you are a patriotic conservative. She was an active liberal in economic policy, refusing to protect jobs and industries that held communities together.

Was privatisation so wonderful? Personally, I think British Telecom is just as bad – in a different way – as the old Post Office Telephones. The privatisation of electricity, and the resulting dissipation of our nuclear skills, is one of the reasons we will soon be having power cuts. The hurried and mistaken closure of the coal mines is another. Lady Thatcher’s early embrace of Green dogma (repudiated too late) is another.

And this country still has the biggest nationalised industry in the world, the great, over-rated NHS. It also has huge armies of public-sector workers in quangos and town halls – only these days they are condom outreach workers or climate change awareness officers.

At least the old nationalised industries actually dug coal, forged steel and built ships. And at least the old industries provided proper jobs for men, and allowed them to support their families. Young mothers didn’t need to go out to work.

Income tax has certainly fallen. But indirect tax is a cruel burden, and energy costs are oppressive. The ‘Loony Left’ ideas she tried clumsily to fight in local government have now become the enthusiastically held policies of the Tory Party.

As for council house sales, that policy was in the end a huge tax-funded subsidy to the private housing industry, a vast release of money into the housing market that pushed prices up permanently and – once again – broke up settled communities. What’s conservative about that? And why, come to that, didn’t she reward the brave Nottingham and Derby miners, who defied Arthur Scargill, by saving their pits?

She was a passive, defeatist liberal when it came to education, morality and the family. In 11 years she – who owed everything to a grammar education – didn’t reopen a single one of the grammar schools she had allowed to be closed as Ted Heath’s Education Secretary.

She did nothing significant to reverse or slow the advance of the permissive society – especially the State attack on marriage through absurdly easy divorce, and the deliberate subsidies to fatherless households.

She loaded paperwork on to the police, and brought the curse of ambulance-chasing lawyers (and so ‘health and safety’) to this country. She introduced the catastrophic GCSE exam into schools.

In foreign policy, she made a lot of noise, but did little good. It was her diplomacy, and her determination to slash the Royal Navy, that made the Argentinians think they could grab the Falklands. True, she won them back, or rather the fighting services did. But they should never have been lost in the first place

Brave as she was at Brighton, she still began the surrender to the IRA that was completed by Anthony Blair. It was all very well standing firm against the Soviet menace, safely contained behind the Iron Curtain by American tanks and nuclear missiles. It was another thing fighting off the incessant threats to our liberty and independence coming from the EU.

She realised, a few months before she was deposed, how great the European danger was. That, I think, was why she was overthrown by the ‘Conservative’ Party. But for most of her time in office she allowed the EU to seize more and more power over this country and its laws. Had she been as great as she is held to be, we would not be in the terrible mess we are now in, deindustrialised, drugged en masse by dope and antidepressants, demoralised, de-Christianised, bankrupted by deregulated spivs, our criminal justice system an even bigger joke than our State schools and 80 per cent of our laws made abroad.

I will always like her for her deep, proud Englishness, her fighting spirit and her refusal to follow the bleating flock. I despise the snobs and woman-haters who sneered at her and sometimes made me ashamed of my class and my sex. I am proud to be able to say that I actually met her and spoke to her.

But I advise both her enemies and her worshippers to remember that she was human – deserving in the hour of her death to be decently respected, but to be neither despised nor idolised. May she rest in peace.

Putin: The Naked Truth

Alas I can understand what is written on the back of the young woman, fashionably protesting against Vladimir Putin.

It is very rude. Apparently the inscription on her front was even ruder.

I have no doubt Mr Putin deserves this sort of thing (though, to his credit, he doesn’t seem to mind all that much).But why, of all the many equally shady despots and tyrants of the world, is he singled out for it? It is simple. Mr Putin, for all his many faults, is the only major political leader who still holds out for his own nation’s sovereignty and independence.

Left-wingers the world over hate this, as they aim to force us all into a global utopia. If you don’t want that, then Putin is your only hope.

Is the NHS our servant or our master? When Mary Kerswell found that her medical records were full of untruths about her, she asked for a copy (as is her right, and yours) and paid a fee.

When she went to collect her documents, officious receptionists refused to give them to her.

When she in turn refused to leave, the police were called, and of course handcuffed her (they love doing this to 67-year-old women, though they are often hesitant about doing it to 17-year-old louts). They have ‘apologised’. Who cares? We know where we stand.

The BBC is making much of a measles outbreak in Swansea. The implication of much of its reporting is that those media who highlighted concerns about the MMR vaccine in the late Nineties are to blame. Not guilty.

Many parents were genuinely worried, and did not find official reassurances convincing. Why should they, given the track record of Government?

If the authorities had really wanted to avoid this, they should have authorised single measles jabs on the NHS.

Two 15-year-old youths have admitted to manslaughter after robbing an 85-year-old grandmother, Paula Castle, who fell to the ground, hit her head and died the next day.

While she was dying, the pair were busy robbing another woman, aged 75. The prosecutor said the pair ‘simply did not care what happened’ to Mrs Castle.

In fashionable circles, you will be accused of ‘moral panic’ if you think this is worrying or significant, and also told that crime figures are falling. So they are. But crime itself is rising.

If
you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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06 February 2013 2:48 PM

Here are a few responses to contributors on the subject of same-sex marriage. First, I am told by someone ‘ I'm quite looking forward to gay marriage passing and seeing Mr Hitchens reaction when absolutely nothing happens in consequence. Don't worry though, I'm sure he'll find some way to fuel his persecution complex anyway.’

Has this contributor read a word that I wrote? I think not.

Then there’s Mr ‘L’Eplattenier, who notes ineffably :’ Mr Hitchens does not present us with a single argument against gay marriage. He says compassionate changes in the law would have been sufficient but does not enlighten us on why giving gay people full equality is wrong in his view.’

Again, has he paid any attention? My first 'Stalingrad' article does not offer an argument against homosexual marriage as such, because I believe this argument is a waste of time, a ballet on the head of a pin, while an enormous social change – the slow death of heterosexual marriage - goes on unobserved, unexamined and criticised . That is the whole point of the 3,000 plus words which I wrote , and which he presumably read, or at least allowed his eye to pass over, before commenting.

Mr L’Eplattenier sets himself up as an intelligent contributor, and he can obviously write clear, literate English. Can he read it? He seems to have come here looking for something he did not find, and been disappointed. Thus his pitiable collapse into baseless personal abuse of his opponents at the end: ‘I cannot help but wonder why all these opponents of the new law are presenting us with such feeble (or sometimes non-existent) arguments if it is not because the real reason they are against it is a deeply seated underlying homophobia.’ Wonder away, Mr L, but unless you can prove this charge, your evidence-free ad hominem wonderings will continue to sound like someone who is one or two propositions short of an argument.

In this he is much the same as the persons on Twitter who , on the passage of the Bill last night, speculated on how I would be enraged, in tears etc. If they’d read what I wrote, they’d have known that I was absolutely unmoved.

I am however, interested. And I’ll come on to one or two aspects of interest in a moment.

Fisrt I will deal with contributors who feel that I should hurl myself into this doomed battle.

One Mr Noonan, asked : ‘"How do you square your view that homosexual marriage is a minor issue with the fact (reported by a leading legal expert today) that 40,000 Christian school teachers will be compelled by law to promote gay marriage or face the sack? It is simply a misunderstanding to say that changing the meaning of marriage only affects homosexuals. It affects the whole of society.’

Because the restrictions on what teachers and other public servants can say in public and on public premises already exist, and have existed for many years. This law will, I acknowledge, probably move the ratchet a little further on. But in how many schools (state or private) does Mr Noonan imagine it is possible to state in class that marriage is preferable to non-marriage, without facing serious discipline?

The adoption under the Equality Act of ‘Equality and Diversity’ as the official ideology of the country, with the keen support of the trades unions (the only bodies which might be able to defend individuals against persecution on this matter) has placed the seal upon this. Speech on such matters is already unfree, thiough the censorship is enforced by threats to the offender's livelihood, rather than to his physical liberty. For some odd reason, people seem to think this threat isn't serious.

Note also the case of the foster parents Eunice and Owen Johns who were rejected for fostering by Derby council, because they would not agree to tell any child that homosexuality was positively a good thing. Note, they were not required to silence any doubts they had, which would have been bad enough. They were required actively to endorse the new ideology, and the courts supported this decision, right up to the High Court which said on March 1st 2011 that homosexual rights "should take precedence" over the rights of Christians in fostering cases.

Mr Blades chides me thus : ‘Some people just want to fight same sex 'marriage' because it's right to do so regardless of whether it's possible to win. This issue isn't just about politics or conservatism but about standing for Christian morality and in those kinds of battles sometimes it's just necessary to make a public stand no matter what your enemy does or says or thinks. Personally speaking, if you don't want to get involved then I'd rather you just kept quiet instead of shouting from the sidelines and discouraging those of us who are fighting. ‘

What are these ‘sidelines’? On what way am I on them? I expose my reputation, and quite often my person, to opponents all the time. I would be more deeply engaged in national politics, were it possible for me to be. I have many times explained here why itis not possible( see 'Standing for Parliament' in the index if this discussion is new to you).

But apart from that, what if you don’t just *lose* the battle (which of course the conservatives have done, and will continue to do, on this subject)? For you will lose it. You have lost it. It is over already.

What if you also weaken your own side by allowing yourself to be made to look foolish and prejudiced, for no good reason? What if you waste, time, energy, resources, money prestige and emotion on a doomed cause, which are irrecoverable and cannot be used elsewhere or in future? Aren’t you then guilty of self-indulgence, making yourself feel good about yourself without serving the cause you claim to embrace?

A friend of mine ( I hope he won’t mind me mentioning this ) recently called me to ask for advice on taking part in a university debate on this subject. My main advice (offered jokingly since I knew the friend wouldn’t pay any attention) was ‘don’t go’. What happened? Why, the opponents of same-sex marriage were treated like pariahs, and voted down derisively, losing so heavily that the Christian, conservative moral cause was left dead on the field of battle. What was the point of this? Does ‘going down fighting’ achieve anything for posterity?

Sometimes maybe. But I don't see how it does in this case. We are obliged to fight intelligently,. as well as courageously. Christ himself was known to sidestep tricky arguments from the Pharisees. Read the exchange which ends with ‘ Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’.

Oh, and to those who glibly maintain that children are happy when their parents break up, or at least not unhappy, I draw their attention to the terrible, heartbreaking messages sent by Chris Huhne’s son, Peter, to his father, and made public as a result of his court case. I have seldom seen a more frightening and raw example of the damage that adults can do when they break their promises in front of their children.

Mr Colin Johnstone’s summary of my position seems to me to be broadly correct.

I’ll add here one or two points about the Bill which seem to me to be interesting. Some opponents of it now say that the Blair Government, when it implemented Civil Partnerships, claimed that this was not in fact a step towards same-sex marriage. This doesn’t appear to me to be true .

Check the House of Commons Hansard for the 12th October 2004 (this is now gratifyingly easy to do) and read what happens as Jacqui Smith, then Deputy Minister for Women and Equality (note this is now a much more senior position, with a cabinet seat) , introduces the Second Reading of the Civil Partnerships Bill . Mrs Smith is taking interventions from opponents of the Bill:

‘Miss Ann Widdecombe (Maidstone and The Weald) (Con): The Minister has several times used the word "equality". Will she be very specific? Is the equality that she seeks that whereby a homosexual relationship based on commitment is treated in future in exactly the same way as marriage in law?

Jacqui Smith: If the right hon. Lady looks at the Bill, she will see that, in the vast majority of cases, it is the Government's intention that those people who enter into a civil partnership will receive the same rights and take on the same responsibilities as those that we expect of those who enter into civil marriage.

Mr. Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con): It would surely be much fairer to Members on both sides of House if the Government came clean and announced that they support gay marriage. Why will they not do so?

Jacqui Smith: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman heard me make the important point that civil partnerships under the Bill mirror in many ways the requirements, rights and responsibilities that run alongside civil marriage. I recognise that hon. Members on both sides of the House understand and feel very strongly about specific religious connotations of marriage. The Government are taking a secular approach to resolve the specific problems of same-sex couples. As others have said, that is the appropriate and modern way for the 21st century.’

Pretty clear, I think(Miss Widdecombe later thanks her for her clarity). And of course those who are now in Civil Partnerships will be able to convert them (presumably for a small fee) into marriages once the Act is law, clear evidence that there is no significant difference between the two.

This is not, in fact, a major change in law, only in terminology and so in the culture wars over language and its permissible use. Even then, as I point out above, it is not that significant, as the Equality Act 2010 pretty much expunged what was left of our former Protestant Christian system (this Act was based on the EU’s four major equal Treatment Directives, which, as sometimes needs to be pointed out, were directives, not suggestions).

The legislation’s principal purpose is to isolate and rout the remnants of the Tory Party’s moral conservative wing, so that, after the Tories lose the next election, which they are bound to do, the defeat will be blamed on their obduracy in face of Mr Cameron’s enlightened heroism. They will then be howled down, Michael Gove or Boris Johnson (bafflingly seen as a figure of hope by so many conservatives) will take up the mantle of David Cameron, and the transformation of the Tory Party into a sky blue pink twin of New Labour can be completed. As usual, the political reporters of the British media, who aren’t interested in politics and so don’t understand it, are quite unable to grasp what is actually going on.

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04 February 2013 1:40 PM

As some readers have noticed, I have been away for a few days, mostly in France and particularly in the cathedral city of Chartres. I plan to write at some length about Chartres cathedral, and its importance to the human mind, but that will have to wait .

Today I will send a dispatch from the Stalingrad front, the terrible, doomed battle into which moral and social conservatives have been lured by the Sexual Liberation Front, on the subject of same-sex marriage.

But before I do so, I will deal with a couple of silly comments, which I had hoped long-standing readers here would answer, but they have disappointed me.

There is of course no necessary contradiction between believing that the great majority of MPs are no good, and seeking to become one myself. I would behave differently from the existing members, were I to be elected. I am very unlikely to be elected. I do wish people would pay attention to my repeated point, that ‘standing for parliament’ (see the index) is almost always futile for genuine independents, because the great majority of votes are cast out of tribal loyalty, rather than from a reasoned choice.

And, as I point out in this week’s column, the crucial moment of selection is not the election itself, which is merely a sacrament of our new religion of ‘democracy’. The sheep-like voters feebly confirm the choice already made by the political party which owns the seat (most seats are safe, and those which are not are unloved by career politicians, as they are bound to lose them on a tribal swing). Worse still, local parties, in both Labour and Tory organisations, have now lost their freedom to choose their own candidates, and independent persons can be (and are ) vetoed from the centre.

When, in 1999, I mischievously put my name forward for the Tory nomination in Kensington and Chelsea, one of the safest seats in the country, I was an experienced journalist who had spent many years covering politics at close quarters. I knew perfectly well that I had not the slightest hope of robbing Michael Portillo of the nomination. So, as I have said before, it is ludicrous to characterise this as a genuine attempt to enter Parliament. It was propaganda, publicity for my (then new) book ‘the Abolition of Britain’, and a chance to point out the failings of Mr Portillo, who was the prophet of Cameronian ‘Modern Toryism’, though many dimmer Tories couldn’t see this, thanks to his Thatcherite credentials.

People who seek safe seats are careful to be selected for, and fight, hopeless ones first, to show their mettle and to serve their time. I never did this. Nor did I ever make another attempt to get a Tory nomination before I left that Party a few years later. This doesn't seem to me to suggest a strong desire to become an MP.

But people frequently urge me to ‘stand for parliament’ having (and isn’t this strange in a supposed advanced democracy) no real idea of what this action entails, how it is done or how MPs are in truth selected. Which is why the index contains a helpful article on ‘Standing for Parliament’.

As for my mentioning Comrade Doctor Lord John Reid’s (Comrade Baron Reid of Cardowan, to give him his full title) past Communism, when I am myself a former Trotskyist, I will once again make a simple point. Everyone knows I was a member of the International Socialists between 1968 and 1975 because I tell them so.They know that I did a summer job for the Socialist Worker in 1972 because I put it in my Who’s Who entry. I do this to make it quite clear that I am not hiding my past and that it is an issue I can and will freely discuss with anyone who wants to know about it.

I do not believe that Comrade Lord Reid has ever been anything like so frank, nor so repentant. I regret my past opinions and actions, and clearly say that what I did and intended was wrong. In this, he is like Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn and many other New Labour figures who have been, ah, closer to the revolutionary Left than they like to discuss. In the cases of Lords Reid and Mandelson, who dallied with official Communism, the problem is in my view greater as, at that time they were associating with an organisation which is now known to have been in the direct pay of the Soviet government, one of the most unpleasant despotisms available in the world at that time. A recent BBC Radio 4 programme, enquiring what had happened to the so-called ‘Euro Communists’ of the 1980s, concluded that they had more or less transmuted into New Labour, whose ideas and ambitions were first set out in their journal ‘Marxism Today’. The programme was right about this but, as usual among those who were never themselves on the inside of the far left, wrong about its significance.

It drew the conclusion that principled young men and women had dissolved their fervour in ambition and conventional politics. My view is, and always has been, that these young Marxists wisely adapted their Marxism to bureaucratic and parliamentary methods, and expressed their revolutionary intentions in a long march through the institutions. I always remember, just before a BBC Radio 4 discussion on whether the Left had won or lost, Comrade Dr Reid, then Defence Secretary, giving an interview in which he used the phrase ‘Pessimism of the Intellect; optimism of the will’.

I was the only person in the studio who knew that this was a quotation from Antonio Gramsci, the very clever Marxist who realised as long ago as the 1920s that the Bolsheviks had got it wrong, and that the left’s route to power in Western Europe was through cultural revolution. There were plenty of educated, plugged-in people in that studio, of my generation. They just didn’t know the code because, even if they’d been vaguely leftish as almost everyone was, they hadn’t been to the closed meetings or engaged in the intense study of practical revolution which the paid-up members had. Here’s my point. It is precisely because I was myself a sixties revolutionary that I understand the language, tactics and aims of the movement to which I used to belong, and can see and explain its many and various successes. Creating a world in which nobody was shocked to have an ex-Communist as Secretary of State for Defence was one of those successes.

But back to Stalingrad. As it happens, it is the 70th anniversary of that turning point in the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians still call it and as we in this country still tend to view it. Alan Clark, in his fine book ‘Barbarossa’ gives one of the most potent descriptions of this hell, far better than in some more celebrated and praised histories. Vasily Grossman’s indispensable novel ‘Life and Fate’ is also a moving account of this horrible war, in which the good person’s feelings must always be torn because of his sympathy for the Russian people and his loathing of the Soviet regime. I must also confess rather guiltily to thinking quite highly of the Stalingrad descriptions in ‘The Kindly Ones’, a rather nasty but very clever novel by Jonathan Littell, written from the point of view of a fictional SS officer. I threw it away after I had finished it, feeling slightly disgusted with myself, but find that quite a lot of it lingers in the mind anyway.

The point here is that I don’t use the expression ‘Stalingrad’ lightly. It is one of the central events of our time, the pivot of the 20th century, and one which probably ought to feature more in art and literature than it actually does.

Perhaps if it did people might learns one of the lessons of it, which is not to be drawn into a trap, especially in search of symbolic rather than real victory, and never to forget one’s ultimate objective in any conflict. It’s nearly a year now since I declined to take part in the great battle against same-sex marriage, explaining my view in an article in ‘The Spectator’ which you can read here

For me, the most important passage in this article is here : ‘The real zone of battle, a vast 5,000-mile front along which the forces of righteousness have retreated without counter-attacking for nearly 50 years, involves the hundreds of thousands of marriages undermined by ridiculously easy divorce, the millions of children hurt by those divorces and the increasing multitudes of homes where the parents, single or in couples, have never been married at all and never will be. If we are to have a Coalition for Marriage (or C4M as it is modishly called), this would be territory on which it might fight with some hope of success.

‘Why should we care so much about stopping a few hundred homosexuals getting married, when we cannot persuade legions of heterosexuals to stay married?’

It is only because a long secular revolution has hollowed out marriage that the idea of same-sex marriage is now both thinkable and practicable.

Some campaigners for homosexual marriage, such as the British-born American blogger Andrew Sullivan, have successfully persuaded many conservatives that the change simply extends the benefits of marriage (a laudable thing in itself) to more people. Why should we stand in the way of this fundamentally conservative desire? Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, writing in my newspaper at the weekend, more or less takes this view. I am hoping to explore this later this month when I have been invited to moderate a debate on the subject between Mr Sullivan and Doug Wilson, a redoubtable Calvinist pastor and thinker, in the USA.

I’d ask such advocates if they think this argument would work if marriage were still the rather fearsome thing it used to be before the 1960s, let alone what it used to be before civil marriage existed at all, and all Wedlock was Holy.

The main thing about marriage until about 50 years ago was that it was, in practice, indissoluble. Divorce, though possible, was a major legal hurdle attended with many embarrassing and unpleasant features. If one party to the marriage insisted on continuing as promised, the other could not get out. Betrayal of the marriage vows was a major act of domestic war. What was more, if you wouldn’t, or couldn’t get married, you were condemned to the fringe of the world. Living in sin was awkward and unpleasant. People frowned on you. It was hard to get lodgings in respectable places. Any children of such a household would almost certainly suffer in various ways.

And I can already hear a lot of people saying ‘Well, quite, and wasn’t this exactly why we needed divorce reform? To which I reply that nothing good comes without a price. If you value the freedom to divorce, then you must accept that it, too, has a cost.

Despite the self-serving litany of so many divorcees (you must have heard it) that ‘the children were far happier once we broke up. Divorce was far better than the constant rows. And now they have two homes instead of one’, we all know in our hearts that in most cases the children hate the divorce and are upset and damaged by it; that rows between grown-up people are not a force of nature, or the weather, but something they can control and prevent if they really wish to; that two homes are not necessarily better than one.

We also know that, where marriage is easily dissolved, it is more frequently dissolved, and that where divorce is simple and cheap, it will be resorted to more readily, and be seen as the normal and automatic response to marital difficulty; that the discipline of lifelong marriage, which compels husbands and wives to learn forbearance and forgiveness, can actually strengthen the moral muscles. We must also recognise that , where divorce becomes more and more common, and where the laws on distribution of marital property and custody of the children heavily favour the divorced wife regardless of who is responsible for the break-up (as they do, see my ‘Abolition of Britain’) , many men will become reluctant to marry at all.

And so cohabitation will increase, and yet more children will be vulnerable to sudden and devastating break-ups of their parents. Of course, the poorer and weaker the individuals are, the worse the consequences will most likely be, ending at the bottom of the heap with a distressing number of homes in which there is no permanent father in the house, just a succession of boyfriends who may well be hostile to, or exploitative of, children fathered by other men. It is in these households that child abuse, physical and sexual, has been shown by the Family Education Trust (which studied family court reports) to be greatly more common (about 33 times more likely) than in any other sort of ménage.

I suspect that it is also from these unhappy homes that so many of the wretched young men and women misleadingly called ‘homeless’ have fled to escape the secret horrors that can be (though obviously are not always) visited on the vulnerable by hostile step-parents.

These are considerable evils, which grow among us. It is really up to you to decide whether they are a worthwhile price to pay for the freedom from lifelong marriage which has been bought through this suffering, and the disturbed, distressed and in many cases ungovernable generation which has resulted from it. For me, it is quite an easy choice. I think we were better off when marriage was for life, and generally lasted for life. I don’t deny that this system had its grave disadvantages, but the thoughtful, responsible person must ask if they outweighed the advantages.

There is another aspect, and that is the great expansion of state power (and the great loss of an important power in the hands of women) involved in no-fault divorce, in which either party can dissolve the contract whatever the other thinks.

In both Britain and the USA, since the 1960s, the divorce law is such that if one spouse wishes to stay married, and the other does not, the state may now invade that house, backed with the force of law and prison, and expel the spouse who does not wish to leave .

Once the legal facts are expressed in this bare form, it is obvious that state power has attacked one of the most private areas of human activity, and conquered a crucial piece of territory. You may favour this. I do not. But whichever side you take, it is absurd to pretend that nothing important has changed.

Then there is what might politely be called the Lysistrata factor. Lysistrata, in the Aristophanes play of that name, forces the men of Greece to abandon war, by organising a sex strike by the women of Greece. In a way, the old marriage rule was a permanent sex strike by the women of Christian countries, under which they demanded binding lifelong promises from men, in return for their favours.

Well, this may seem crude and disagreeable to us now, but once again, look at the growing plight of older women in our society, embarking on grotesque plastic surgery, botox etc to stay in the market for male favour; look at the nasty development known as ‘the trophy wife’ , invariably involving the cruel discarding of a previous wife, and look in general at the number of serial divorces and at the Bridget Jones problem of young women who cannot find husbands.

These are deep social changes, and they are not in all cases beneficial. They are, as always in this subject worst of all for the children, who are shuttled around from relationship to relationship and from home to home, for the convenience of adults. We are already paying quite heavily for this, and the bills have only just begun to come in.

Since the 1960s reforms, they have never really been revisited, despite the fact that they are almost 50 years old and have led to many serious problems, which weren’t anticipated by their framers.

Nobody in mainstream politics has said ‘This law had many bad consequences. Perhaps we could moderate them’. The principle of freedom from a lifelong, faithful bond was the thing, and that apparently cannot be reopened. Yet it seems to me that it should be. I for one would be very willing to look into ways of reforming marriage, making exits for those who really needed them, while simultaneously making divorce particularly hard where young children were involved. There could be different degrees of marriage, under which those who wished to could choose, in advance, a form which was much harder to dissolve ( I believe there have been experiments along these lines, of ‘so-called ‘Covenant Marriage’ in some parts of the USA), These would have to be their own reward since, like Nick Clegg, I really can’t see that marriage allowances in the tax system (though desirable in themselves) will influence anyone’s intentions very much.

In the midst of this, the contractual arrangements of a few thousand homosexual couples are a tiny matter. My own view was always that wise and compassionate reforms of inheritance law, tenancy transfers and the rules about next of kin, could have increased human kindness without raising a great political storm. But it’s not a battle I wish to fight , when the far more important war, for the survival of marriage itself, is being lost across that 5,000 mile front.

As for the political flim-flam of this week, Mr Cameron and his allies, of course, want to destroy *conservatism* while keeping the *Conservative Party* in being , as a safety valve for conservatives in a liberal society. The same-sex marriage issue is a perfect vehicle for achieving this. What he desires is a country in which all the parties are in fact the same, but have different names so as to absorb tribal energies and maintain the tragi-comedy known as universal suffrage democracy. As I wrote long ago, Communist East Germany had a multi-party parliament. The only thing wrong with it was that all the parties, though they had different names, agreed on all important matters. I struggle increasingly to see any serious difference between the old People’s Chamber of East Berlin, and our current arrangements.

Mr Cameron does not care about losing votes and members, because (like all rich liberals) he personally has nothing important to fear from a Labour government, which is probably inevitable anyway. He is, as he told anyone who would listen, the heir to Blair. He meant it. He said it. He has always acted accordingly, as I said he would.

The mystery is not why Mr Cameron hates conservatives, which is obvious and easily explicable. Liberals do hate conservatives. It is why so many conservatives still give their loyalty to him, and their votes to his party.